Thoughts on Freakonomics

A number of people have asked me what I think of the bestselling book "Freakonomics" written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. On the front of the book, there is a glowing blurb by me which would suggest that I love it. On the other hand, chapter four of Freakonomics is devoted to the question of why crime dropped so dramatically in America—and particularly New York—in the 1990’s, and in that chapter Dubner and Levitt reach a very different conclusion than I do in "The Tipping Point." In fact, "Freakonomics" specially singles out for ridicule the theory of broken windows, which I suggest in the Tipping Point played a big role in New York City’s recovery. So what gives? Why do I love a book so much, if it contradicts my own book? Have I renounced the theories I put forward in the Tipping Point?

I have two answers. The first—obvious—point is that it is not necessary to agree with everything you read in a book to like that book. I have a number of problems with several chapters in Freakonomics, because I find the way in which economists approach problems occasionally frustrating. That being said, it’s very difficult to read Freakonomics and not find yourself saying "wow" every five minutes. I loved it.

Now for the long answer: what do I think of the substance of their crime argument? Is the Broken Windows theory central to the question of whether crime dropped, or isn’t it?

The Freakonomics argument starts off very much like the argument I make in The Tipping Point. The startling decline in crime in major American cities in the mid-1990’s is a mystery. No one predicted it. Everyone thought that high crime rates were a permanent feature of urban life. And the standard arguments to explain why crime falls don’t seem to work in this case. Levitt and Dubner go through all the usual explanations for crime decreases—a booming economy, decline in the crack trade, innovative policing strategies, tougher gun laws, aging of the population—and find only two that they think really matter. Putting more police on the street, they say, which happened in major cities all over the country in the early 1990’s, was a major factor. So were the soaring numbers of young men put away in prison in that same period. But neither of those two factors, they argue, are sufficient to explain the full magnitude of the crime drop. There has to be something else—and their candidate for the missing explanation is the legalization of abortion.

Levitt’s argument (and for simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the argument from now on as Levitt’s) goes something like this (and keep in mind that I’m grossly simplifying it here). The huge declines in urban violent crime rates happen, more or less, eighteen years after the passage of Roe v. Wade. States that legalized abortion earlier than the Supreme Court ruling saw their violent crime rates fall earlier. When you look at falling crime rates, the reductions in violent behavior are almost all concentrated in the generation born after the legalization of abortion, not before. People undergo abortions, in other words, for a reason: because they are poor, or don’t want a child, or live in an environment where it is hard to raise children. An unwanted child has a higher chance, when he or she grows up, of becoming a criminal. By removing a large number of unwanted children, legalized abortion ended up lowering the crime rate. Levitt makes it clear that he’s not passing judgment on this. He’s not pro-abortion, as a result of this observation. He’s just explaining the way he thinks the world works. He also stresses—and this is because even more important—that he doesn’t think that crime fell in major American cities solely because of abortion. He thinks abortion is simply one of several factors—albeit a significant one—in the crime drop.

Is Levitt right that legalizing abortion has played a role in lowering violent crime rates? Levitt has a few critics, and he’s dealt with them pretty effectively, I think. (Check out Freakonomics.com) There are some other technical critiques of his work from fellow economists, that, I have to confess, I can’t follow. My own response is chiefly that I find the argument incomplete.. For instance, the biggest drop in fertility in the U.S. came with the advent of the Pill in the mid-1960’s. The Pill allowed lots of women who would otherwise have become pregnant not to become pregnant because they were poor, or didn’t want a child, or lived in an environment where it was hard to raise children. But the fertility drop caused by the Pill didn’t lead to a decrease in crime eighteen years later. In fact, that generation saw a massive increase in crime. The advent of abortion in the early 1970’s, meanwhile, caused a far, far smaller drop in U.S. fertility but—Levitt argues—that drop is consistent with a fall in crime. In other words, the unwanted children whose births were prevented by the Pill would not have gone to become criminals. But unwanted children whose births were prevented by abortion would have gone on become criminals. Why is this? I can think of some hypotheses. But they are just that: hypotheses. I would have been a lot happier with Freakonomics if the crime chapter had been twice as long—and spent more time explaining just what is so peculiar, in terms of crime rates, about births prevented by abortion.

But that’s a quibble. In the course of making his argument for the importance of abortion Levitt is also pretty dismissive of other, alternate, theories—especially the theory that I spend a lot of time on the Tipping Point, namely the broken windows idea.

It’s here, though, where I think Levitt’s argument is a bit unfair. Levitt concludes that there are three factors that matter the most in the crime drop—abortion, high rates of imprisonment of young men, and increased number of police officers. The last of these three factors he glosses over pretty quickly. But I think that’s a mistake, because what is increased police presence? Well, having more police on the streets than before means that law enforcement can be more aggressive and pro-active. It means officers can do a lot better job getting guns off the streets. It means that they can be much more vigilant than before. It means that they have the time and resources to start cracking down on the kinds of seemingly minor "lifestyle" crimes than might have gone ignored before. The kinds of things that I argue were so important in responding a civil environment in New York State—the crackdowns on graffiti and public urination and panhandling and turnstile jumping in the subway system—are all the kinds of things that police departments can do when they have more officers on the streets. In Freakonomics, Levitt pretends he has refuted the Broken Windows explanation. He hasn’t at all. In fact, to the extent that he concedes the huge role played by the expansion of police departments in the 1990’s, he tacitly supports the Broken Windows theory.

So why is he so anxious to discredit Broken Windows? One—understandable—explanation is that he makes his own argument more compelling by dismissing all other arguments. (I know all about this tactic. I do it all the time). But a deeper explanation, I think, has to do with the difference between the perspective of economics and the perspective of psychology. Levitt is very interested in the root causes of behavior, in the kinds of incentives and circumstances that fundamentally shape the way human beings act. That’s the kind of thing that economists—particularly behavioral economists—think a lot about. And rightly so: who we are and how we behave is a product of forces and influences rooted in the histories and traditions and laws of the societies in which we belong.

But there’s a second dimension to crime, and that is the immediate contextual influences on human behavior. If you talk to a police officer (or a psychologist) they’ll tell you what a "typical" murder looks like. It’s two men, drunk at a bar. They get in a fight. They step outside. One pulls a gun in anger and kills the other. You can prevent that homicide by creating a population of people who are less likely to get drunk and angry in bars. You can also prevent that homicide by decreasing the likelihood of either of those drunken men having a gun. Police-work is concerned, necessarily, with this kind of immediate influence on behavior, and one of the things that having lots more police did was to make it possible to reduce the number of guns on the street that could end as a cause for a homicide. Drunken young men still fight in bars in New York City. But now they fight with fists—which are a lot safer.

Freakonomics is a book about deeply rooted influences on behavior, because it’s a book written by an economist. The Tipping Point is a book, by contrast, about the kinds of things that law enforcement types—and psychologists—worry about, because it was written by someone who is obsessed with psychology. I prefer to think of Freakonomics not as contradicting my argument in Tipping Point, but as completing it.

One final point (just to complicate things even further). Since Tipping Point has come out, there have been a number of economists who have looked specifically at broken windows—and tried to test the theory directly. Some have found support for it. Others—particularly Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago—find it wanting. If you crave a rigorous critique of broken windows, read Harcourt. He’s every bit as smart as Levitt.

Comments

The problem with Malcolm's argument about abortion spurring a drop in crime vs. the Pill NOT spurring a drop in crime is the intention behind the action. Women who take the Pill want to prevent pregnancy but that does not logically lead to "a pregnancy is an unwanted pregnancy". Lots of married women who got pregnant on the pill did not have abortions. The Pill was intended to prevent pregnancy, not end it.

Abortions, however, are intended to end pregnancy. Therefore, a woman who gets an abortion does NOT want that particular pregnancy at that particular time. This is where the Freakonomics argument becomes convincing. A woman may not want a pregnancy, but when she goes that extra step to END the pregnancy there are often very good reasons. And, until the late 1970s when Congress ruled that Medicare didn't have to cover abortions, many more poor women were able to get abortions.

OK, so I haven't even done a desultory scan to see what the observed "facts" on the installed base of projectile weapons are, but I am puzzled, to say the least, by the statement that increased police presence has meant fewer guns on the street.

As a casual observer of modern society, I see a huge gun lobby, a popular cultural ?movement? (Rap and its offshoots) that, while it may also glorify hip hop entreprenuers, surely glorifies guns (usually by brand name.

Another movement (white power) is dedicated, in theory anyway, to violent confrontation.

New organized crime groups ("The EthnicGroupXYZ Mafia") are reported to have made inroads in all large cities.

Gun shows continue to draw large crowds.

So, as I say, I would be surprised if guns are "off the street" in meaningful numbers.

Full disclosure - as a white suburbanite, I doubt that the bars I frequented in the 80s were awash in guns, so my perspective may be utterly worthless.

I think that people MAY have been shooting each other in the 80s because the music they were forced to listen to was so annoying. This makes the recent drop in crime even more puzzling to me.

The strength of Levitt's argument, I believe, lies in that he has identified a factor which corresponds both nationally and regionally to the crime-drop - your window-theory does not. You might very well be right about New York; I don't think you're right about New York, Dallas, San Francisco, Detroit, Rahleigh/Durham, etc. etc.

The Pill argument has some problems in that it assumes poor,uneducated and other demographic groups more likely to have unwanted pregnancies had access to contraception like the pill; and that even if they did have access that they chose to use it. This could make the Pill problem raised in this reponse - not much of a problem at all in termsof the accuracy of Levitt.

An increased police presence would also have a cumulative effect. If an auto thief has stolen 50 cars and never been caught, he is unlikely to be swayed by longer prison sentences or three strikes policies. (He won't get caught, if past history is any indication.) Catching him repeatedly when he is a youngster means he'll decide the probabilities aren't in his favor. The police response doesn't have to be very punishing, just likely.

I find this dialogue intriguing with both writers putting forth convincing arguments. Mr. Gladwell is on to something when he draws an economics vs. psychology contrast in outlooks. I like to look at it more as something qualitative vs. something quantitative. In economics, one looks for isolated mechanism that you can prove with numbers, controls, and chi square testers. Mr. Gladwell's approach is harder to prove by isolating mechanisms. Its complexities speak to me on an intuitive level. Although they don't have the focused, surprising pop of Levitt's arguments, Gladwell's approach may have more levels of application stimulating new curious extensions to smaller and larger-scale queries.

I find the whole debate here fascinating, but writing from distant India...I may just want to add a few lil observations.
1) Too often, the words hypothesis and theory are used interchangeably...that shows poor conceptual clarity. Knowledge, in the end, is more than science and scholarship.
2) If A has a correlation or causal relation with B, it proves a lot but still only a little. There are various factors influencing A (let us say X, Y, Z) and B as well ( Let us say K, L, M).
Now, each of these variables correspond to a subject, from the discourse above: Psychology, sociology, economics, politics (much debated above), technology, physiology, ecology, anthropology (not debated or insufficiently debated above).
A true seeker would get the algebra of interdisciplinary thinking right before getting into the statistics of INTRA-disciplinary scholarship.
But academicians love proofs and studies more than the truth, nay?

Utilizers of abortion (whose rights I fully support) have, by definition, not planned ahead to prevent an unwanted conception.

Users of the Pill, by contrast, have planned far ahead to prevent conception-- by seeing a doctor, obtaining a prescription, and taking the Pill every day, whether or not sex is on the horizon.

I do not know if "not planning ahead" is a behavioral trait with a genetic basis. But I do know that two contributors to not planning-- namely, impulsivity and thrill-seeking-- can be passed on through genes, specifically through a gene called DRD4, which affects how the body processes the neurotransmitter dopamine.

I also know that criminologists and psychologists have linked high levels of thrill-seeking and impulsivity with increased risk for criminal behavior in young men and women. Correlation is not causation, but Gladwell's homicidal-bar-fight example would be less likely to occuer if the two men arguing inside the bar were, say, risk-averse and highly contemplative.

Perhaps the legalization of abortion gave "reproductive non-planners" the chance to prevent the birth of offspring who would otherwise have inherited their propensity to take risks and act impulsively. And perhaps before Roe, the non-planners had far fewer options to prevent the births of infants genetically predisposed to act first and think later.

The fact that crime went down is completely correlative with the fact that UNEMPLOYMENT went down. It went down to Early 1960's levels. This is not to say that unemployment in urban centers was not still unacceptably high, just to say that a lot of young men who might otherwise have time on their hands didn't.

How boring an explanation that is, not the stuff to make an incredibly hip book with an incredibly hip title.

There are other factors as well, among them, once you see a bunch of your friends get offed in drive-bys, AND you have a viable alternative (which, altho not all and certainly not enough had, but unquestionably many more than before had) to get a legit job, you might rethink this whole lifestyle that puts you in harms way.

And by the way, where is the Freaking (to coin a phrase) science? Did anyone do any statistics as to WHO had the abortions in the first place. Dood, you'll find they were NOT the poor but the middle class, and, in fact, the upper middle class. You know, that hot bed for breeding violent crime??

And, uh, I guess it's inconvenient to bring up the epidemic of teen pregnancy in depressed economic areas that coincided with the rise in abortion. And who were having those babies. The vast majority were poor and urban, so one might expect ON THE CONTRARY a RISE in crime 20 yrs later, ie, in the 90s... But then again, that would be confusing "amazing" theories with the facts...

PILL V. ABORTION
Let me suggest it transcends demographics. The prime mover is the cognitive mapping of the woman, and that can be affected, among other things, by "class" or social status or cultural training. Or not.

Demographics tell us things because of averages, but each individual is making a set of individual choices. Women who count on abortion as their catcher in the rye when they might have been using contraception might be victims of rape or people who have a hard time gauging consequences (causeeffect logic) or as previously stated, too poor or too remote (some rural women in the Dakotas have to go over 100 miles to get legal contraception) or too uneducated to get reliable contrqaception. And, just to echo what's been said here more cleanly than I can, mothers affected by any of those factors are less likely to raise an unwanted foetus in an informed healthy optimistic/hopeful way.

This may be off topic, but is anyone familiar with "Think! Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye"? It's by Michael Legault, a former Washington Times contributor.

I haven't read it, but just by looking at the dust jacket and reading the info from the publisher, it's clearly piggy-backing off the popularity of Blink!. "Outraged by the downward spiral of American intellect and culture..." so begins the publisher's blurb.

"If bestselling books are advising us to not think, LeGault argues, it comes as no surprise that sharp, incisive reasoning has become a lost art in the daily life of Americans..." I thought this was a bit disingenuous: I don't recall anywhere in Blink! reading that we shouldn't think.

Anyhow, I was curious if anyone had read Think! Some of the reader reviews on bn.com were not flattering (e.g., "political rant, not critical thinking").

Is it possible that both the abortion explanation and the broken window explanation are wrong? Perhaps, during the time period studied, youth just became less alienated from society. Why? Maybe their parent(s)finally had jobs with more discretionary income for these youngsters. That, plus the mainstreaming of the hip-hop culture, and what did these youngsters have to be alienated from? Looking for arcane reasons like abortion or more police may be "looking a gift horse in the mouth," so to speak. This lowered crime rate may just reflect the success of our economic system to make more young people feel like there is no reason to be alienated and criminal.

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The first—obvious—point is that it is not necessary to agree with everything you read in a book to like that book.
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You would think that is obvious, but it is not. Thanks Malcolm for all you do!

I won't wade through all the comments to pose a question - with abortion vs the pill aren't those child-avoidance solutions that are targeting different consumers? Is the practice of abortion a second chance after the pill - or a first line of defense. I have no used either, being that I am in a guy... but here is my though - if you are poor then you might not have the money to spend on pills, so you risk it by using condoms until something doesn't work right (or does work right) and then you have an abortion. Pills seem to be a middle class solution to the problem - and if there is a relation to crime and class level then would the rise of the use of a pill really affect violent crime? (Some crimes I understand are commited by suburbia - but violent crimes aren't typically found there to my knowledge.) Any thoughts, comments, ideas, snide remarks?

The best part of Gladwell's response is that it's in an open forum. Let Levitt respond accordingly because I'd be interested in what he has to say now that Gladwell has stepped up and presented a case. Regardless, both books were thoroughly enjoyable and those who say one's crap is just being silly...

The most interesting thing about this post is the comments. As with all things internet, people are freaks (myself included) about certain things in our lives. I tip my hat to Malcolm for creating an area for passionate conversation. Regardless of who liked what.

Bio

I'm a writer for the New Yorker magazine, and the author of four books, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference", "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" and "Outliers: The Story of Success." My latest book, "What the Dog Saw" is a compilation of stories published in The New Yorker. I was born in England, and raised in southwestern Ontario in Canada. Now I live in New York City.

My great claim to fame is that I'm from the town where they invented the BlackBerry. My family also believes (with some justification) that we are distantly related to Colin Powell. I invite you to look closely at the photograph above and draw your own conclusions.